If You Hold Me (A Sugar Maple Novel Book 4) by Ciara Knight

Author:Ciara Knight [Knight, Ciara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781953396020
Published: 2021-01-12T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Sixteen

Tanner fumed. He knew the best place for him to be was expending his energy in a productive way. The way his father had taught him. At that thought, he picked up the pitchfork and impaled the hay. Luckily, the work crew on the roof had knocked off already, so he found the silent refuge he’d hoped for.

The sound of footsteps crunching hay warned Tanner that someone had entered the barn, but he didn’t look up. He needed space before facing his mom again.

“In a strange way, I get your mom.” Mary-Beth’s voice was soothing, but her words were jagged and rough. “She wanted to save you from a hard life. It was wrong how she did it, but I understand. Your mom loves you.”

He shoved the tines into the hay once more. “How can you say that?”

“Because she looked guilty and remorseful. I know she wished things were different. Trust me, my mother was the instigator. Don’t you remember how she tried to control me yet was never around to enforce her demands?”

He rummaged through memories and snagged an incident from their past. “You mean when she thought you should wear the blue dress to prom, but you wanted to wear the red?”

“Yep, she took the red dress and hid it so that I couldn’t wear it.”

A picture of Mary-Beth standing at the bottom of her steps on prom night stuttered in his head. “You showed her, though. You cut that blue dress to barely permissible in public.” He laughed, tossed the pitchfork into the hay, and faced the only woman he’d ever loved. The way he saw her was different, the resentment gone, and he could see the girl he once thought broke every rule with finesse but managed to always avoid trouble. “I thought your mother was going to have a stroke when she saw you.”

“But the red dress reappeared.” She winked, a sexy, grown-up wink that made his heart double tap. The woman who stood in front of him was no longer the girl from his past. Who was she? Had she changed? Of course. Hadn’t they all?

“We need to talk, uninterrupted,” Mary-Beth announced in a way that told him she had changed. She had grown into an independent person who didn’t need him to take care of her.

He quirked his head toward the ladder. “Remember the hay loft?”

She blushed but shot past him and up the rungs to a more private area of the farm. A place where he could see and hear others while they were cloaked in wood and hay. His body awakened the way it would with any private moment with a woman, but this wasn’t a woman he’d met in a bar or some football groupie… This was Mary-Beth Richards. A woman who would bring any man to his knees for a chance at one kiss. And she could kiss. The kind that ruined all other kisses in life.

He took his time climbing the rungs to focus on the importance of how he handled the situation.

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